Glen Ellyn School District 89 passes pandemic plan

With the urging of school nurses, but without a case of something serious like ebola in sight, Glen Ellyn School District 89 has passed a pandemic prepardedness policy.

"This actually was on the agenda long before ebola hit the news," Superintendent Dr. John Perdue said at a recent board meeting. "This would include any pandemic."

District nurses had brought up the subject of what to do in a pandemic, so the board used a one-size-fits-all policy suggested by the Illinois Association of School Boards.

"We use that service as an economical way to keep our policies up-to-date," Perdue said. "We pretty much adopted it wholesale."

The policy is intended to be inclusive and cover any kind of pandemic, despite the fact that it specified influenza. That resulted, Perdue said, from situations in the last five years or so of various schools across the United States closing and cleaning to stop a flu outbreak.

"Scientific models support school closure as an effective means of reducing overall illness rates within communities and suggest that the value of this intervention is greatest if school closure occurs early in the course of a community outbreak," the policy says.

But it does not state the tipping point of an outbreak that would require a school be closed.